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Thomas Edison

AC/DC

The Movie Man

Summary

The mid-1880s brought dramatic changes in Edison's life.
The first of these changes was the death of his first wife, Mary
Stilwell, on August 9, 1884. Stilwell died at the age of twenty-nine,
leaving Edison a widower at thirty- seven years old. Since he was
still fairly young and possessed of a large personal fortune, he
was quickly barraged by offers of "sympathy" from young women.
The one who caught his eye was Mina Miller, a nineteen-year-old
from a well-off Boston family. They met in the winter of 1885 and
were married on February 24, 1886.

Mina Miller was a more assertive woman than Mary Stilwell
and proved to be an invaluable companion to Edison. To occupy herself during
her husband's long absences, she was active in the community. She
also raised their three children–Madeline, Charles, and Theodore–in
their new house in West Orange, New Jersey.

1886 was also the year Edison opened his new research
laboratory in West Orange. Having outgrown the Menlo Park facility, Edison
set about building a three-story building with an attached powerhouse
comprising more than 50,000 square feet of floor space. The new
facility had an emphasis on manufacturing and business as opposed
to invention. These new directions complemented the turn of Edison's
career. Still, important new inventions came out of the West Orange
facility, such as the Kinetoscope and the dictating machine. Edison
also perfected the phonograph and the electrical light system at
West Orange.

Patent battles and competition with George Westinghouse
temporarily slowed Edison's research on electrical light systems,
but competition spurred his research on the phonograph. Because
it had yet to provide much income and was still widely considered
to be a toy, Edison had let the phonograph languish. But Alexander Graham
Bell, distraught that he had not invented one first, saw great
market potential in the device. In 1885 he and two of his colleagues
applied for a patent on their invention, the "graphophone." The
graphophone depended heavily upon Edison's phonograph technology.

Bell then approached Edison with a proposition to jointly
market an improved phonograph. Edison, furious, set his energy
to improving the phonograph. He produced several new models in
the early 1890s and searched for a dependable power source that would
make the device useful for the home market. He found the perfect
match of consumer demand and high quality in 1896, when he began
marketing a forty-dollar spring-motor phonograph, and sales skyrocketed
into the early 20th century.

Less successful were Edison's forays into the ore-milling
business. Edison first became interested in ore-milling in 1880.
In the course of developing his electric light system, he invented
and patented a magnetic separator for iron ore. His hope was to
develop a competitor to ore mines for the east coast market. He
set up plants as early as the summer of 1881 but did not devote
himself fully to the project until January 1889.

Unable to attract investors to the project, Edison financed
his own mines. The most promising site was at Ogden on the border
of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Edison moved there for five years
to work on the project and sunk some $3 million into it. It was
a massive undertaking, dependent upon a complicated system of ore-separation.
It also used an intricate procedure of conveyer belts and assembly
that influenced Henry Ford when he built his Model T business.

Unfortunately, the bottom fell out of the iron ore market
just as Edison was preparing to put his product on the market in
1891. The Panic of 1893 had weakened businesses and prices dropped
across the board. In addition, new deposits of pure iron ore were
found in 1892 in Minnesota, further ruining Edison's chances. The
eleven-year-long debacle drained Edison's personal finances and
came to be known as "Edison's Folly."

Analysis

The 1890s were a transitional period for Edison. With
so many projects and businesses, he no longer had the freedom of
the lone inventor. He took a new interest in manufacturing and
production, recognizing that the real profitability lay in those
two elements of the invention business. For years Edison had done
the inventing while his financiers and business interests made
the real money. Now he determined to control his own inventions
and business decisions. The West Orange facility was less romantic
and dynamic than the laboratory at Menlo Park, but it fit in well
with the direction of Edison's vision.

The phonograph is a good example of what happened more
and more toward the end of Edison's inventing life. In order for
Edison to see the profitability of one of his inventions, a competitor
had to lead the way. This had very little to do with Edison's capabilities
as a businessman or an inventor. In addition, sometimes he did
not want to use his devices in the ways competitors were using
them. Bell saw the marketability of the phonograph in the idea of
a music box. Edison wanted to use the phonograph for educational
purposes and resisted the idea of marketing it as a music device.

Despite his initial neglect of the phonograph, Edison
quickly asserted his rights when it appeared that he would be threatened
by a competitor. Therefore, when Bell began encroaching on his
invention, Edison shook off his anger about the potential uses
of the phonograph and set about claiming his share of the market.

The ore-milling fiasco is an unfortunate chapter in Edison's inventing
life, but what is remarkable is the way he bounced back afterwards.
In 1897 he even established an ore-milling syndicate in London.
And he recognized a potential market in one of the by-products
of ore-milling–cement. In June 1899, soon after the closing of
the Ogden plant, he founded the Edison Portland Cement Company.
The business was the fifth largest cement producer in the United
States by World War I.